Death Is Bad

There’s two primary types of magic in fantasy novels. The personal kind, in which a wizard casts a spell himself, usually completing it within a few seconds of starting. It can have stunning effects, but it’s rarely very complex. Then there’s ritual magic, which involves a group of wizards combining their efforts, casting for a long time (usually at least minutes, sometimes hours or days), and often involving significant material components or sacrifices. The results can be almost anything, and are usually game changing.

Industry seems to me to be ritual magic that we humans can actually do. A few extremely knowledgeable wizards develop the ritual aspects of the spell – what actions must be taken, what order they must be taken in, how often they must be repeated. They determine what material components will be needed to invoke the powers of the beyond, and how they are to be manipulated by the casting wizards. Then they invest a great deal of time, money, and energy into bringing all the required elements to a single place. After this they train support wizards in the casting of the spell, assigning a role to each, and watch as the world is altered to match their will.

This level of magic is extremely powerful. One such ritual can create a large device – big enough for a man to sit in with plenty of room left for carrying physical goods. It can move this man, as well as many hundreds of pounds of material, for hundreds of miles at speeds faster than the swiftest horse. It does so without tiring, needing only occasional stops to refuel. It protects the man in a cage of steel, keeps the air at a comfortable temperature around him, and plays music for him to keep him entertained. There is not a single wizard of those who cast the ritual that could have made this device on his own in even a year’s time. Yet when combined with others to multiply their magic, they can produce one such device per wizard every three days! They can produce them so reliably and affordably that nearly every family owns one of their own. Many own several.

Imagine what could be done in a world where everyone was a wizard, and the majority of the population spent ~40 hours a week casting ritual magic. They would never need starve. They could see nearly anywhere, and speak with nearly anyone, at any time. They could travel to other worlds.

Joseph Campbell (allegedly) said “The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.”

As long as I’m talking about things I’ve changed my mind about…

I used to be of the opinion that there should be no tax breaks for having children. This seemed like an incentive for humans to have more children, which I was told was bad. Children are a drain on society, and they’ll grow up demanding more food, products, and energy – creating waste and pollution. If anything, people should be taxed for burdening us with more kids!

Naturally I eventually realized that this meant the best way to end waste, pollution, and all bad things was to eliminate the human race entirely. During my most depressive period I thought this was an ideal solution. I have since changed my mind, but there are others who still willingly bite that bullet.

Nowadays I’ve come to realize that all value come from beings that can value stuff, and that on net, every human produces more than they consume. This should have been obvious without anyone pointing it out to me, and yet somehow I missed it. Every group must produce at least as much as it consumes, or it will starve. For millennia we’ve been producing more than we need for survival, allowing some people to work at non-food-production tasks. World GDP (or just GP, I guess?) continues to go up at a rate faster than population growth, we keep getting more productive per-person. Each additional human makes all of us richer on net.

(yes, this is in aggregate; and yes, this assumes we have not reached the carrying capacity of the planet)

This turns the problem on its head. Raising a human is very expensive, $235k per child just up to the age of 17. Parents are shouldering these costs primarily on their own, in addition to the vast restriction on freedom and loss of free time they experience. They generally do not recoup these costs later. And the childless, like myself, reap the benefits of a growing society of people who produce far more than they consume without paying into it by raising children of my own. This is becoming enough of a problem that we may reach a peak population of ~10B this century, and start losing population after that!   Many developed countries are already experiencing below-replacement-level reproduction rates.

As someone who wants to make the world more like me, I have to ask if I can live with myself – literally. It appears that in this regard, I cannot. So I’ve come to the conclusion that not only should people receive benefits for having children, but that currently we are giving them far too few. I am obviously going to have to start voting for higher taxes on myself in order to subsidize the altruistic among us who are willing to make the sacrifices to raise the next generation.